AI Process Automations To 10X Your Business

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Transcript

Welcome to the did you know Podcast by Varisource where we interview founders and executives at amazing technology companies that can help your business save time and money and grow. Especially bring awareness to smarter, better, faster solutions that can transform your business. 1.2s Hello everyone. This is Victor with varisource. Welcome to another episode of the Did you know podcast. Today we have Jared Tun who is the Director of Global Partnership with Neostella with us on the show. Neostella is a leading global hyper automation solutions company. And in the world we live in nowadays, automation AI is a hot topic. So super excited to have you on Jared. 

U2

Yeah. Thanks, Victor. No I really appreciate you having me on. Excited to talk to you guys today. 

U1

Yeah, a lot of amazing topic as you and I know and obviously really glad we've been able to partner with you guys to help a lot of clients with automation across their business. But as we kick off, why don't you give a little audience, a little background of yourself. 1.7s

U2

Yeah, certainly. So I actually came from a finance and accounting background that was my focus area in school. Did it for nearly a decade for a very large financial institution here in the US and just kind of got sick of it. Got tired of it. Mutual fund compliance isn't exactly something that makes you get excited to get out of bed every day. So thankfully had an opportunity to switch to the SaaS industry and working for a salesforce implementation partner for a couple of years, meeting a great CEO there who I happen to now again work for at Neostella. So kind of a weird duality with my background, but it really allows me to take a very user focused approach to the things that we do at Neostella like automation and integration and workflow management and things like that. Because I spent years and years and years being extremely frustrated with the types of technologies that I had access to. So it just gives me, I think, a nice perspective to level set with our clients and just see the capabilities and utilization that we have with the products and services we do. So. 1.1s

U1

Yeah, I think Salesforce is a great example. It's an amazing tool, amazing SaaS, amazing technology. But 1.3s people that buy Salesforce, they still need implementation partners and consultants to help come in and customize and really make it useful for that company. So I think we're in a similar discussion here, but you and I talk a lot about RPA. We're passionate about it, we love it, and we've been working in the last couple of years already. But RPA still first of all, what does it stand for and what is it actually? 1.1s

U2

So RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation. There's a lot of people out there that think that they should just get rid of the robotic at this point because it makes people think too often of robot arms on a car manufacturing floor. But it's process automation. It's taking the repetitive, rules based, tedious BS tasks that so many humans have to do in their jobs these days across so many industries, where things like data entry, taking data from one screen, putting it in another, or an Excel sheet, processing an invoice where it's very repetitive to say, we need to take these four information points from this PDF. They're always in the same spot, put it into this system, make a journal entry, push it off. So really think about as long as it's a process that you can very much repeat over and over and teach a software bot the same you would a human. These are the types of processes that are very good for our PA. It goes beyond that, though, to things like machine learning models for document extraction and things of that nature. They can offer digital assistance where humans can work with a bot to basically kick those off for like a contact center agent. But it's. 1.2s Ah, a technology that's really, really kind of grown from its initial beginnings. Really coming out of, you know, workflow automation and screen scraping tools to really just kind of catapult over the last five or six years. You know, I'm sure, you know, you've seen the, the crazy amount of growth in just, you know, looking through a LinkedIn feed and, and seeing, you know, how often automation is talked about in RP. Gave is hashtag 1.5s because I think there's just been such a focus on giving both employees and clients better experiences. People are demanding better both as employees and clients 1.5s in recent years, which is a good thing, in my opinion. So to allow for tasks that no one likes to do, but that are business critical, that allow for a customer to have a better experience, it goes into the renewed focus on what can we use to accomplish this? And RPA is one component of that journey. 

U1

Yeah. And again, personally, when I learn about RPA and for those techie guys out there who use the Zapier and let's say workflow automation, those type of tools get the concept of automation right, there's more efficiency. But really the technology has been around for quite some time, like you said, and it's evolved, but it hasn't really taken off. What I mean by that is you're not seeing every company using it. You're not seeing I would just say even majority of companies even forget using it. They don't even know what it is, right, or never even heard of it. And so it hasn't really taken off. And so you've been in the industry for a while. Why do you think that is? 1.6s I think there's a few key reasons. First of all, as you mentioned, it is still considered an emerging technology. Right? It really has only been four or five years since there's been multiple products with a good reputation that people are starting to absorb in the market. Blue Prism automation anywhere. UiPath Power automate being kind of the first generation ones. And so people sometimes are wary of new tech or they feel like it's too advanced for their needs. Right. Or it's seen as a nice to have. And even in the last few years before we started hitting some restraints in spending, 1.3s there's other technologies out there that are seen as more mature and mission critical, which I think is a misnomer because by bringing in automation as part of a digital transformation strategy is critical because you have to automate and integrate as much as possible to ensure that your tech stack is working smoothly. It's making your employees headache free, it's creating less risk for your organization. 1.5s But a lot of people don't have that foresight right away, especially now that budgets are constrained. And on that topic, I think cost has been historically another issue, especially for market leading tools like UiPath. 1.1s Because it's a fantastic platform. 1.3s It's truly enterprise level scale. Discovery suite, document understanding, machine learning, test suite, all these great tools that make it a very powerful platform. But 1s it's not cost effective for some organizations because to invest in the level of licensing that you need to get started can take minimum of year and you're expected to grow as a customer. And sometimes that's just not realistic for a lot of smaller mid market organizations. And one great thing about that though, is the fact that Neostella saw that need and we've been able to go out and secure a managed service partnership with UiPath where we can now provide a consumption based model for licensing. So there's a few other companies that do it, but we were the first. We're really focused on that small and mid market segment, mid commercial. So it's allowing us to at least tackle that and say, hey, you know what, let's instead of having to acquire two bots that have 24 7365 capacity, the test bots, the dev bots, it builds up quickly. And let's just say, hey, you know what, if you need 30,000 minutes of runtime a year, we'll just charge you for 30,000 minutes of runtime and you don't have to worry about the dev licenses, you don't have to worry about the test bots. We'll take care of that. So not only does it offer people a right size, consumption based model, but it also 

U2

lowers that barrier to entry for a financial standpoint to allow someone to get started with one or two more simple processes, validate the platform, start to get over some of those other barriers to why hasn't it taken off. 1.1s We think it's going to be an effective tool to help address some of that. But back to your original question, 1s that kind of helps sums it up. 1.3s Yeah, 

U1

no, I think when we say it hasn't taken off, I think we usually say that it means the general overall business market, right? And you have the SMB mid market enterprise. And a lot of times the enterprise, I'm sure all have automation in mind. They're more sophisticated, they have the teams, they have the budget, 1.6s but that's a small percentage of the overall business market, right? And I think when we say it hasn't taken off is because the general public either never had the expertise or had the budget, right? Just the cost. Like you said, it wasn't democratized in a way. And I think that's why I love partnering with you guys, because the business model of what you guys saw, how you're turning that enterprise solution, yet offering it available to 1s SMB mid market is fantastic. So love that. So to kind of go on to the next topic, obviously, AI, chat, GPT, you name it, literally has taken the world by storm in the last just couple of months. Pretty amazing, actually. But I think a lot of people also mix those things up together, right? Like AI, RPA is all robot, it's all machine, it's all like AI is everything is all like kind of joined. They all think it's the same thing. So in your kind of maybe point of view, what is the difference between RPA and AI? 1.7s

U2

Yeah, no, great question because there's a lot of misconception about there. What is AI? And automation is a word that's far too often associated as a like for like. Because when you look at something like RPA, it in and of itself has nothing to do with AI. Right. Because when you look at the core of RPA, it is taking, you know, a repetitive process where you teach a bot step by step what you're doing. You know, there's some logic you can build in. Right. But it's not going to create for you as far as the way that a generative AI is going to take the examples it's given over and over and over again. Obviously, the key these days everyone's realizing is, hey, we don't have enough data to properly train these. But the difference there being there's actual intelligence involved to say I'm going to take all these examples and create something out of it. Not, I'm going to take these three examples and recreate them. Right. Exactly. So to me, RPA and machine learning, it's utilized what it's taught in different examples to create and recreate a repetitive process. Whereas AI is truly taking the additional step to learn and to create net new and not just repeat, if that makes sense. I think that's the biggest key that people need to understand between something like automation as a general term and an AI is that when you're looking at automation, it can't be assumed that there's a learning component. There an AI component. 1.5s

U1

Yeah, 1s I think all of these things are going to be able to work together and create even better and more workflows. I mean, it's an exciting time for technology. So 1.1s my next topic was to kind of have you talk about some use cases for RPA, but I want to change it up a little bit in a sense that want to give you three scenarios of use cases and maybe you can give us a little bit 1.3s your expert thoughts on it. So maybe scenario one is 2s from an industry perspective, maybe pick an industry, whatever industry that you guys really thrive in, and talk about use case specifically for that industry. And then the second is maybe for a little bit larger mid market enterprise, a little bit larger company, maybe a use case for that, meaning you have more resources, how can RPA help you? And then the third maybe is for SMB, right? You're a smaller organization, less resource, less budget, everything. Maybe a use case of how RPA can help the SMB. Does that sound 

U2

good? Yeah. Victor? No, thank you. I appreciate the split there. So there's the great thing about. 1.1s Automation in general is that it's very agnostic. Right? It's agnostic to industry. It's agnostic to department. Basically, you're looking across the board as far as where you can apply it. But we definitely excel in a few. And one of those is the manufacturing industry. So we are headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where I'm from Go Bucks. But 1.2s I live in Austin, Texas, these days. But we do a ton of work with manufacturers, kind of due to being kind of born in the upper Midwest. And there's just a lot of good use cases, too, right. One of the kind of knocks on manufacturing is they're always slow to adopt technology, right? Slower than most industries. But with RPA, that's almost a benefit, because in manufacturing, you have a lot of legacy systems. You got a lot of homegrown operating systems, older ERPs and things of that nature, where a lot of modern integration tools don't work well because there isn't readily available APIs. They're just not easy to work with, easy to access, if they're there at all. So utilizing RPA, really as a kind of middleware on steroids is one use case that we often see within manufacturing. Just likely they'll have a slightly more advanced accounting or financial tool using an ERP of some sort. So it's about connecting those to potentially a legacy inventory system. I mean, we've connected as 400 green screens to more modernized architectures. So kind of just as that middleware that can access anything and everything because it can utilize the UI if necessary, that tends to be a pretty good use case in manufacturing. But along with that, too, we do a lot of document processing, right, invoice processing, purchase order processing, bill elating processing for transportation companies, things of that nature. So if they have heavy, heavy volumes of any structured document processing, that's always a great place to start, too. 1.7s

U1

Yeah. No, I love that. And again, if any companies, anybody wants to learn more use cases for your company, make sure reach out to Jared and Neostella. But you talked about UiPath, and I want to kind of 1.1s have you kind of explain. So UiPath is the software is the tool, is the technology similar to, again, salesforce, right? The tools and technology that does the work. But in order for because these tools are so complex and needs a lot of customization and managed service, especially if you don't have the expertise in house, 1s that's why they need a managed service partner. So why did you guys decide to work with UiPath? And why should companies work with you guys for Aipath instead of Direct? 1.3s

U2

Yeah, 1.1s real quick picture. Did you want me to still cover just another use case for, like, Enterprise and then one for SMB? 

U1

Yeah, no, that'd be great. 

U2

Okay. Yeah. So back to your previous question. So those are manufacturing. So for Enterprise, due to having more resources, more budget, but mostly due to having a higher volume of onboarding and offboarding. A lot of HR use cases for initial setup of employees. Some of that document processing, right? Sending standardized forms, getting them back, putting those in an HRIS system, account provisioning and deprovisioning as people are hired or let go or they quit. So when there's high volumes of doing that in the multiple dozens every week, that can help take a lot of the manual tedious labor off of the HR specialists at an organization when they're not having to do that, as well as it not having to do the provisioning. So that's a really good use case for Enterprise or larger mid market where you've got a lot more volume of employees coming on and off. And then lastly, SMB, I would say SMB, we generally like to look at finance use cases, right? There's a lot of low hanging fruit in finance and accounting, as you can imagine. A lot of very repetitive processes. Doing account reconciliations, doing tax estimates, doing things like 1.6s compliance verification, 1.2s budget estimates, things like that. So when we're able easily take different values from fields, whether they're in spreadsheets, accounting systems, ERPs, whatever it be, we can massage that data, move that data, change that data as we need to and create the outputs that we need. So with SMB, finance tends to be a really good starting point, just in general. 1.4s

U1

Nice. 1s Those are great use cases. And as we kind of progress to the next topic again, we talked about UiPath being that technology, being that tool 1.1s leader in the market. But at the same time, and I don't know if it's the right analogy. You tell me, Jared. They're like the salesforce, right? They're the tool that technology, but they still need implementation partners and partners like yourself who can customize it for individual companies who doesn't have the expertise in house. Right. So is that the right comparison? And why did you guys decide to partner with UiPath? 

U2

Yeah, so that is the right comparison. Yes. To answer the second part of that question first, then our CEO's name is Matt Loud. He's had the fortune and ability to be a kind of a serial entrepreneur. And one thing that he really likes to do, though, is in the initial stages, especially of one of his organizations, if you're partnering with a vendor, you focus on a single vendor, a single product, because you get to the point where you're the best at that product. Not pretty darn good at a lot of things. So when he created Neostella, he knew that the focus was automation in RPA specifically. So he did his due diligence and went to Blue Prism Events, automation Anywhere events and UiPath events for about six months and did his research to say, what is the market leading tool? Which one do I think has the right roadmap? Who is going to be be the one horse that we hit our wagon to? And it turned out to be UiPath. And over the last few years, they've continued to develop the platform truly in an enterprise scale 1.1s series of solutions. It truly cannot be matched from a technical capability standpoint. When you talk about the overall scope of everything they can do, because they have traditional RPA bots with unattended processing, meaning sitting on a virtual machine or server, or attended processing, meaning that Digital Assistant. But they have the whole Discovery suite. They've got the Document Understanding suite, the test suite, the Enterprise compliance suite. They've got an API integration suite. So they truly, truly have continued to develop into what is considered by Forrester Gartner, IDC, all of those as the market leading platform. So that was the reason why we initially said, this is who we're partnering with. And then really, the whole question around partners in general, utilizing a consulting partner, 1.1s whether a company has no It department or an entire 1.4s crew of engineers and It staff and specialists. 1.2s It always makes sense to at the very minimum, engage with a partner, at least for an exchange of best practices, right? We often will do standalone training engagements just because, hey, we get it, you're capable, you have the ability to build this and scale it after you learn it a bit. Let us at least help you learn that initially and teach you best practices. Because the ability to properly, you know, build the infrastructure that you need to get those tricks and tips that people that do it day in and day out for the last three or four years, there's no reason that's not worth a small engagement, at minimum, right? But then there's a lot of companies out there that just don't have the capabilities internally to manage a project like this because it truly is a long term journey when you're looking to transform your organization with automation, with additional integration and making it just a more secure, strong and nice to work in for the environment. That takes a while and it takes commitment to doing it long term. So this isn't something that you can just put in walk away, right? So having a partner there alongside you for that journey where even if you do get to a point where you are self sufficient, it's nice to always have that escalation point when you get stuck, there's a bug you just can't quite figure out. You have capacity issues and you need to get something built and you just don't have the internal timeline ability to make it done. It's things like that, right? Because people have full time jobs as is. So when you take on a project like this, it tends to either cause a new hire or two or for people to be completely reallocated. So there is still a cost to self implementation. So I always, always will say, hey, at minimum, at least get some training, some best practices type engagement from a partner to establish that kind of culture around automation dollars. But there's obviously a multitude of levels of the way that we can work with clients all the way up until full build support and maintenance from end to end. So. 1s Definitely a lot of benefits for a company. 

U1

Yeah. And also, again, I love the business model, financial model that you guys have built to make it cost effective for any size organization. So we love partnering with you guys because of that. Obviously, the next topic is talking about ROI. 1.9s In this economy, every company is trying to or has to try to do more with less. 1s That could be resource, budget, people, all of these things. Right. So how can Neostella I think it's a pivotal moment for RPA. This could be the time that it really takes off because it can help people do more with less. I think that's one of the main purposes. So what have you seen in the last twelve months and kind of moving forward? 1.5s

U2

So one thing that we make a point of is we never want to automate a process just to automate it just because a client asks for it. So whether it's a net new business or it's a client we've had for four years, we always go through the exercise of what is the return on this for you, at least at a high level, before we agree to a contract. Right. Because, A, you never want to leave a bad taste in your mouth. Right. And if we get to a point where we've automated something, but the cost to automate it was three times what it's saving, well, that's not going to make someone happy. So we want to ensure, since we're focused on long term engagements, that we are going into something for the right ideas. Now, it's not necessarily always about just the dollar return, because emotional return, emotional ROI is a thing. 1.3s I think that was a bigger conversation when companies capex budgets were a little larger. Right. But giving employees a very good environment to work in, one where they're not focused on tedious BS tasks, that helps with attrition. Attrition is expensive. Right. There is around about financial cost to that. So we are in the business of making sure that there is some kind of return for the client before we automate at a very high level. You can look at it as, what is this process taking you today? How many individuals do you have on it? How often are they doing this per day? How many days per week or month or so on so forth? What are the ancillary costs to this process? And then we take a look at, okay, what would it take to automate it? Is this going to be a process that we can get to 90% plus automation? Is it going to be just automating components of it, but basically saying, hey, here's the as is cost of this process for you on an annual basis, this is what it's going to take to automate it? If there's a return, great, let's discuss this. 1.9s If it's a break even, but there's a bunch of emotional return on it too, great, let's discuss this. So we go through that exercise with all of them, and it truly can have a lot of cost saving measures, right? Because the thing about RPA and Bots is they don't make mistakes. They do what you teach them to do. So if you teach them wrong, they'll make mistakes, but they don't make mistakes. So having to fix mistakes, having to go back errors, risk, all of that, that has extra time and therefore extra cost associated with it. That's lowered too. 1.7s Sorry, Victor. It's a long answer to say that every client we have, we want to make sure that does this provide a financial return, an emotional return, a combination of the two. Are you going to be happy with these results for this cost? Right? And with that managed service model, we're now overall bringing the cost down, which are making the conversations a little easier the last six months. But 1.3s it's a big decision, and we never want clients going into it without knowing, hey. Yes, this is the expected return in results for me. 1.3s I know. I really like that approach, actually, where you guys look at each Thing that customers trying to automate, because sometimes in their mind, they want to automate something. But like you said, I don't know if they truly did an ROI in their mind or realistically, is it worth it to really automate this Piece? And so the fact that you guys take that approach is great. But we're all about asking tough questions, not just the easy ones you and I talked about. So obviously, I Think maybe one of the reasons why it hasn't taken off or even just people look at AI. The same way where a lot of workers look at RPA, AI those tools, technology as replacement of workers. And I think for technologists like us and really trying to leverage technology to help people, not replace people is really, I think, just like AI. It has an opportunity to level up the employees, whether it's automating certain administrative tasks or giving the employees more ability through technology to do even more. 

U1

Right. But what's kind of your thoughts on when there's concerns from people this RPA is here to take over, I guess. 1.3s

U2

Yeah. And it's funny, I hear this both with my professional network, prospective clients, and also just my personal network. When I talk about work, it comes up inevitably. Aren't you just replacing jobs? And that's never the route that we take. That's not our messaging, that's not our goal. 1.2s Is it a tool that some people use as, hey, here's how we can eliminate some positions? Yes. Frankly, there's some organizations that do look at it in that way. We are here trying to recognize the fact that humans are meant for better than data entry or staring at a screen and moving some sentences, or staring at a document and putting some data into a few fields. That is 1.5s mind numbingly, boring work. No one in their right mind really likes doing that, right? So we are here to let humans focus on the creative, on the strategic, on the value add, harder but more invigorating and more fulfilling work, and letting the stuff that should be handled by bots be handled by bots. So we're out here with a message of, this is how you increase your employees experiences to make this a better place to work, to make them happier, which in turn makes your clients happier and having a better experience. How many examples do you need of these places that are highly, highly rated workplaces that are just absolutely crushing the financial side of things, too? You give people a good place to work. You give people a happy environment, an environment where they're not focusing on the BS, the stuff that makes them want to pull out their phone and get distracted, and you're creating a much better environment. So, yes. Can RPA be something that a company might look for? Contact center? Let's say RPA is something that can vastly reduce the amount of average handle time on a call, the post call wrap, and the number of agents that are contacts underneath. That's a fact, right? But in most cases, we're out here just trying to take away a portion of numerous individuals work. Right? You're never one to one eliminating a human for a bot because there's just a lot of things bots can't do. So you're trying to take away that 10%, that 20% of someone's day. That is just they're better than the work than that. Right? And they could be focused on things that are going to, in the long term, help the organization be healthier, stronger, and grow more too, in my opinion. 1.4s

U1

Yeah. You actually mentioned something really interesting, which is we talked a lot about today about 

U2

what RPA can do, the use cases, but I want to ask you maybe one or two examples of what 

U1

RPA cannot do. And it's not a good use case 2.1s for RPA, I 

U2

guess. Certainly. Yeah. No, it's been great, great thing to touch on. Think of things that are like tribal knowledge, right? So if it is a collective knowledge, where you've got to ask Jan in accounting because she knows the ABC account better than anyone, and that's the answer you need to fulfill a process you can't automate that. Right. A bot needs to know where it's grabbing something, where it's moving it, where it's writing it, where it's copying it, what it's moving, what it's doing in a very rules based sequence. Another thing is, 1s one of the big benefits of RPA is the fact that it can do UI user interface automation, but also UI and automation can break quicker. Right. It's always healthier to use the code. It's always healthier to use the APIs when possible. 1.4s So if there's a system or process where the UI is changing frequently, where there's constant updates, basically spelling out that there's going to need to be non stop maintenance on that bot to update it, to keep up with where it's needing to interact on that interface, that's not a headache that anyone wants to deal with. Right. That's not a good process, 3.2s obviously. Just tasks that humans can do. Right. RPA in and of itself isn't going to call someone and have a conversation. It's not going to be able to move things around physically in any way. So there's a lot of ways that RPA just falls short of being a complete human worker. Right. But there is that portion of the human that they should and can replace in a lot of different types of jobs. 1.5s Yeah, I think maybe the scary part is if you combine Chat GPT with RPA Plus, google plus, the robot Elon Musk is creating, if you combine five or six of those technology together, you might have then maybe one day long in the future, robots will take over. But right now it's 5.3s that's almost sentient sentient robot there. That's that's scary. But no, I mean, you you make another good point. I mean, our our Friends, another RPA provider we partner with Robocorp, they are a gen, two python based and open source platform that, due to being python based and open sourced, has the ability to handle the needed data requirements for something like Chat GPT a lot better than other tools. So they've got an official partnership, and 1s RPA Plus Chat GPT is already here. 1.9s We're already one step of the way to that all knowing robot being. 1.1s

U1

Yeah, it's exciting and scary at the same time, but no, this has been a great 1.1s discussion, and we're excited to partner with you guys to again bring this technology to all businesses, not just the enterprise. But the last question we always love to ask our audience, or not audience, but our guests like yourself, is 1.3s you've seen a lot, done a lot. If you have to give one advice, whether it's personal advice or business advice, but something you're really passionate about, what do you think that be? 

U2

Jared? It. 1.2s So this is probably going to be along the lines of just general professional or life advice, but coming from that background where I pretty much did a career 180 at the age of 30, more or less, that to some is scary. I kind of just dove right in and it was literally one of the best decisions I've ever made in my life. So if if someone is thinking about a new project, a new career, a new something in life, that is a big change, but they're excited about it, they think it's the right fit, just go for it. Because if it ends up being a mistake, there's time. You got time to fix it, but you don't have time to go back and make that same choice. So that's probably the best advice I can give. 

U1

I love that one, man. Again, appreciate your time and look forward to partnering with you guys. 

U2

Likewise. Appreciate it. Victor 

U1

that was an amazing episode of the did you know podcast with Varisource. Hope you enjoyed it and got some great insights from it. Make sure you follow us on social media for the next episode. And if you want to get the best deals from the guest today, make sure to send us a message at sales@varisource.com.